The Prayer Calendar

The Burundi Team is extremely grateful for all the faithful prayer coverage that we received leading up to and during St. Michael’s Healing Mission to Burundi. Prayers were felt throughout and answered throughout.

Many people that received the Prayer Calendar commented about how much they liked it and found it useful. Since a testimony is a way to honor God’s work, we thought we would begin our report with a testimony about how this project could have only been accomplished through the power of the Holy Spirit.

The team embraced and approved a “simple” Prayer Calendar idea. Its purpose was for use as a practical tool to help our Prayer Intercessors follow the team’s daily mission agenda, to know individually who to pray for based on each team member’s mission assignment and to know clearly what our specific prayer needs were.

Our team realized that our simple idea had turned into a 16 page, 5×7, color print, cut, hole punch and binding assembly job, using 2,520 pieces of paper (for 180 completed calendars) and a special piece of equipment required to punch the holes. The Burundi Team met again and prayerfully decided that if was God’s plan to make it happen, and to offset the costs, we would agree to purchase the hole-punching/ binding assembly machine and donate it to the church to use for future projects.

So often the untold story about Mission is the incredible, front-end preparation and support work done by the church staff. It is one thing for a mission team to come up with an idea about how to attract interest and support for mission, but something different altogether to turn that idea into a practical, functional, useful, marketing tool; especially on time and within budget. The Prayer Calendar was one such idea and we owe so much gratitude to Vicki Vazquez, Jeanine Branham, and Catherine Bowen for their support to help make it happen.

Vicki took our basic 16-page Prayer Calendar design, formatted it differently into her computer, gave it to Caity Booman for design refinement, sent it back to us for proofing, corrected the calendar and was ready for printing, production, and assembly by the early part of the 3rd week prior to departure. By the end of that week, members of the Burundi Team met with support from Vicki and her staff, and the 180 Prayer Calendars went into full production and were completed.

The team then began distribution of the 180 Prayer Calendars to St. Michael’s Prayer Intercessors, friends and family who all agreed to pray for our Burundi Mission. And, because it was a complete digital file, it was distributed electronically to countless other prayer intercessors.

We believe that through the prayerful decision to create a Prayer Calendar, the St. Michael’s Church Healing Mission to Burundi received the largest concentrated number of daily prayers in the long history of our mission trips to Burundi. Thank you, St. Michael’s, for your prayers.